Saturday, December 4, 2010

The Basics: Building Your Site

The first thing your site will need is a name. That’s easier said than done these days. All the best words in the dictionary have either already been bought and built by developers or they’ve been bought and offered by speculators.

But that doesn’t mean you can’t create a good name and buy it for a song. Putting two words together with a hyphen can work (like http://www.adsense-secrets.com) and there are plenty of good names available if you’re prepared to move outside the world of .coms into .net and .biz etc.

Your first stop should be www.DomainAnything.com. This is a nuts and bolts service that lets you hunt and buy names, order hosting plans and even submit your site to the search engines. When you’re looking for a name, you can just toss in ten options and the site will tell you which (if any) are available. Find a good one, and you can either buy it there or pick it up at www.godaddy.com (they can be a bit cheaper). All in, buying a name from one of these service won’t cost you more than about $9 a year.

If you can’t find a name you like and that hasn’t already been grabbed, you can take a look at sites like www.moderndomains.com and www.bestnames.net. These are companies that buy domain names and sell them for a profit. There’s a good chance you’ll find some good names here but they can cost you anything from $50 to $50,000. Before you part with a penny, think about the advantage that a good name can bring and ask yourself if you can’t get the extra traffic a cheaper way. Often, you can.

Choosing A Hosting Service
Your site is going to be stored on a hosting company’s server. (You didn’t want thousands of people dialing into your computer every hour, did you?) Again, there are lots of different options available depending on how much you want to pay and what you need.

In general, you’ll want to make sure that you have about 50 megabytes of space (that’s enough for 100 pages!), full statistics reporting and most importantly, 24 hour service. If your site goes down, you’ll be losing money every hour it’s offline. If there’s a problem with the server, you want to make sure it’s fixed right away.

You get what you pay for with Web hosting. “Free” services will cost you more than you save in lost revenue, and you can pay up to $200 a month for dedicated servers. Twenty bucks a month is a reasonable price to pay and GoDaddy.com and NetworkSolutions.com both offer good programs.

How To Make More Money With Google AdSense

Google wants a slice of your traffic. And they're willing to pay big bucks!

For those who have been complaining of high traffic and low sales, there's simply no better way to cash in on those hard-earned visitors to your web pages.

AdSense makes it so easy!
There's no complicated software to install, no need to scout for affiliates, nothing to buy and no need to even have a merchant account. So…

Why isn't everybody doing this? More importantly, why isn't everybody making the most of it?

It's "Hidden Money"
"Seeing is believing", they say. Most webmasters love to obsessively track their visitors, earnings and CTR's several times a day. They love to see what's there, but they often miss what can be.

AdSense doesn't give you ultimate control over which ads are served, how the ads are rotated or what each click is worth. That's a good thing, because it's hands-free income. (It does give you some control though, and I’ll tell you how to use those controls in this book.)

But many webmasters still think that once you've stuck the AdSense code on your page, there's little you can do except wait and watch.

Nothing could be further from the truth!
Google gives you a great deal of control over your ads, and especially their visual or graphic elements. By tweaking these elements to your advantage, you could easily — in as little as a few minutes — multiply your click-throughs many, many times over!

Little cogs run the AdSense machinery!
It's easy to get carried away when you're making so much money. But I never lose sight of the little things that make me big money with AdSense. Every AdSense partner — however big or small — knows that at the end of the day, it all boils down to one thing: stats! Your AdSense stats might not be amazing to start with, but make it a habit to go through it with a fine-toothed comb. As you start making sense of those 'little numbers'… the big checks with follow!